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December 16, 2012 - December 22, 2012

December 21, 2012

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

The difference between 2013 and every
year that has come before, for liberals, is offense.

Liberals have spent a generation
playing defense. We have spent over 40 years getting beaten by
conservatives, whenever push came to shove. We have considered it a
victory when some gain from the past was kept safe, if only for now.
And we have watched conservatives use those limited victories for us
to raise ever-more money and drive ever-deeper wedges between us, to
the point where “pissing off liberals” became a convenient excuse
for any policy, no matter how wrong-headed.

This should not surprise. Conservatives
felt just this way in the early years of the Nixon era – it's what
fed Nixon's paranoia, which was organic, and came from his followers.
They assumed that any policy victory might be taken away, or
co-opted, at any moment. They assumed they were the minority, and
acted like one, right into the Reagan Administration.

December 17, 2012

Whether you call it “extreme gun
ownership” or “gun fetishism,” the attitudes behind the mother
who bought these weapons are common on the American right today.

Many people are struggling to put this
new attitude into context, and explain it to foreigners, but my own
writing gives you a frame.

These are hippies. And what happened
last week, what is happening across the country as these incidents
spiral, is very similar to what happened with the “leftist kids”
in the wake of of 1968. Kid who'd been innocently tripping out on pot
turned to harder stuff, they turned to cocaine and heroin. A lot of
them died.